Camden Market: The London Market with a Punk Soul
You once came to the biggest building in Camden Market limping. It was a horse hospital: right up until the years before the Second World War, more than 800 hoofed patients a year passed through it, horses that pulled delivery carts and hauled barges along the canal. Today the same stables and tunnels sell leather jackets and curry from all over the world.
Camden Market is the collective name for six neighboring marketplaces by Regent's Canal in Camden Town and one of the biggest markets in the United Kingdom.
Six Markets at a Single Lock
The name comes from the water: Camden Lock is a lock on Regent's Canal, and the market that grew up beside it borrowed the name. Others gradually grew up around it - the old stables, a new hall by the canal, the Electric Ballroom concert venue - until today there are six of them under a single brand. London has dozens of markets, and each of the big ones does one thing well: you go to Borough Market for food, to Portobello Road for antiques, to Broadway Market for a neighborly Saturday. Camden is the only one that specializes in something you can't carry home in a bag: alternative culture - and it pulls in a quarter of a million visitors a week. Even so, the operators complained in the local paper that it gets too crowded at the lock and that they need more people. Both sentences ran in the same newspaper article.
From a Horse Hospital to Punk
The stables went up in the middle of the 19th century, built by the haulage firm Pickfords for the horses that delivered goods around the city and towed barges along the canal; in the busiest years more than four hundred of them were stabled here, with a hospital of their own and slings that took the weight off an injured horse's legs. If you know the market that moved into Prague's old Holešovice slaughterhouse, you'll recognize the pattern: when industry moves out, the stalls move in. Canal traffic dried up, and on March 30, 1974, two childhood friends opened a market in a run-down timber yard by the lock: sixteen stalls of antiques and crafts, Sundays only. Two years later the Ramones played the nearby Roundhouse - a night now remembered as the moment punk exploded in Camden - and the stables that used to take in horses filled up with studded jackets and goth dresses. For the record, punk wasn't the only scene here: ska, reggae, new wave and goth all came through the same neighborhood. But it was Camden that turned punk into a uniform.
Amy Winehouse's Playground
You'll read all over the place that Amy Winehouse lived right by the market. The truth is a little different: she lived on Camden Square, about a kilometer and a half from the market, and she called Camden Town her playground. Her local was The Hawley Arms, a pub that lost the back of the building to a fire in 2008 - the regulars raised the money and bought it back. Three years after the singer's death, on what would have been her thirty-first birthday, a life-size bronze statue of her was unveiled at Stables Market. Fans still hang bracelets on her wrist.
What I Ate and Who I Met at the Market
You can eat almost anything at Camden: the food stalls run from Italian classics through Afro-Caribbean grills to Middle Eastern delicacies, and British cuisine is represented here too. The stalls tempt you with portions on display, so you can see exactly what you're getting for your money, and most dishes cost around eight pounds - less than you'd pay in central London; cards are accepted practically everywhere. Keep in mind that the stalls don't start serving until around 11:30, and if you want the market after dark, come on a Thursday, when trading runs into the evening.
I ate here too, and I'll be honest: the food didn't stand out in any way, so for me Camden Market remains a food tip with a caveat - you'll eat quickly and without paying a fortune (by London standards), but I wouldn't come back for the flavor. For everything else, I would. The smell of the grills under the brick vaults, the statue with a wrist full of bracelets - and on my way out, a punk with a pink mohawk and a tattooed face. I took his picture, and it's the best souvenir I brought back from Camden. The market by the lock sells all sorts of things - but the thing it sells best is itself.
Camden Market
